MEGAN MCARDLE: “The appalling poverty of Sri Lanka or Mozambique is not some bizarre aberration that can be tracked to a cause we can cure. We are the aberration; Sri Lanka and Mozambique are the normal state of human history.” I, of course, would like to see this aberration spread until everyone is rich and healthy. But she’s right — poverty, etc., are the default condition.

UPDATE: Reader Steve Ford sends this quote:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded- here and there, now and then- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

-Robert A. Heinlein

Indeed.